Sonic Booms

[Rigel Stardin]

They were also known as the Widowmaker, because they killed so many German pilots. My understanding it was an error in the design and not the pilot's fault.

 

[whartung]

It was a great scene in "The Right Stuff", beautiful plane in that sequence.

 

[Condottiere]

Hard to crash into the Sun in space.

 

[Grav_Moped]

@ Vargr Breath: During a military exercise, my unit got buzzed by I believe it was a West German F-105 at about 200 feet (no higher than 450) at high speed. That's when I realized how superior air power was. Be young and dumb It was amazing sight, 40+ years later I should have shat my uniform.

Watch and A-10 do a target run on burned out military vehicles at Fort Polk. They scare me

I've seen what was left of a range-contractor's Suburban after an accidental strafing run by an F-16 (20mm TP ammo, not even HEI).

Don't want to be on the receiving end of that. And, no, nobody got hurt -- they saw the inbound plane in time.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Yes... the "missile with a man in it". I never saw one outside a museum.

But I did see F-105s flying around northern Utah in the late 1970s (the last F-105 squadrons were stationed at Hill AFB)... and even had a pair fly past a couple of hundred feet to the side of, and ~fifty feet below, myself, my brothers, & our Father as we were rock-hunting in the northern part of the Silver Island Mountains of northwestern Utah.

Close enough that I could see the pilot of the closer one turn his head to look at us as they passed.

Wish I could have seen one in flight. The museum at Hill has one (and a lot of other nifty stuff -- it's well worth the trip if you're anywhere near).

Hill's tenant units have a proud tradition of using fast planes as slow bomb trucks. And being very good at it.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Hard to crash into the Sun in space.

Where else are you going to crash into it from?

But you're right. Takes a lot of delta-V to kill orbital velocity for a solar impact.